It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.
There is only uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support if the marketing is actually deceptive and if there is an actual lack of support.
People have been burned a few too many times by less reputable developers (EA) selling unfinished, deceptive garbage (SimCity 2013) at full price, so a certain amount of uproar and skepticism when it happens again and again is to be expected, I think.
But there are good, reputable companies too who are doing honest business by selling quality games for a reasonable up-front price. I don't generally see people having an issue with that.
See if you can find a lot of people who are unhappy with dropping $60 on Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, for instance.
Also, in the old days of early Internet era, we used to buy games not based on some marketing (in my parts of the world, US videogame marketing didn't really exist anyway), but based on reviews in videogame magazines. Those were pretty honest, and if they weren't, we'd blame the magazine. It was entirely expected that games have varying quality and plenty of bugs. People didn't have a problem with that.
an upfront price made sense in the old days when a relatively polished product was released at launch, perhaps with a couple patches to fix bugs, and with users running their own multiplayer servers.
for better or for worse, the norm has shifted to longer periods of support and servers hosted by the company. it's hard to commit to supporting a game this way when each user only pays once.
personally I like the approach csgo has taken. you get a full game for free (although it was still a good deal at $20, imo) and you can pay for purely cosmetic items. I think this aligns the incentives well; the devs can only get paid by making game that people care about playing, but there's also an unrestricted stream of new players since it's free. plus if you decide your finally done, you can sell all your skins on the market and get at least some of your money back.
I will fully admit that I have only the faintest idea of how modern multiplayer games work, but I agree from my understanding that the old business model of selling a complete game once seems ill suited to that style of game.
(Although, counterexample: Mojang made a fortune out of selling Minecraft, a complete multiplayer game, where you host your own servers, with no paid DLC or hidden catches, but then later came out with the Realms thing where they had optional paid server infrastructure. That's a thing you can do. Not sure how it panned out.)
That being said, my point was that there are still plenty of companies, such as Nintendo, successfully operating in the traditional way without facing much hostility for daring to sell a complete, polished, mostly bug-free product for money.
Therefore I think it is inaccurate to state that "every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility" like the grandparent did.
to be clear, I'm not saying it's totally not viable to just release a good game and charge for it upfront. there is a small number of studios/publishers who have such good brand recognition (or just consistently ship really good games) that they can actually make money this way. it can still work well for games with little ongoing maintenance cost from established companies making AAA titles or indie devs who don't have the same upfront costs.
all I'm saying is that there are other "game-as-a-service" models that can align incentives well between players and devs for ongoing projects without necessarily being abusive.
GGP is sort of right though. gamers are a notoriously difficult group of customers to please, and they don't really have a way to understand the business or technical constraints faced by the makers of their favorite games. the worst of them will be uncharitable and hostile, no matter what you do.
It's not about winning - people will complain because that's what people do. Users complain about free products as well, sometimes rightfully and sometimes with too much entitlement. It's not about the monetisation model.
Creating something and putting it out there for free or for a one-off payment is the cleanest possible model.
Regarding the next game from a game developer, I remember an indie making the point that the feedback from the general public (not the loud minorities only) will mostly be felt on the sales of the next game of series and, to a lesser extent, the next game from this developer.
Exactly. It is only when upfront sale gets combined with season passes AND microtransactions AND lootbox-systems is when criticism gets to arise. Rightfully.
